Ex marine and wannabe writer Caleb (Carl DiMaggio) returns to his
hometown, and before you know it, he has hooked up again with his ex Liz
(Penny Balfour) and has had sex with her (though she's only days away from
getting married), and his old priest Joseph (Charles Stransky) - whom he
doesn't have sex with. But he's also plagued by dreams about a red door
and a cloaked killer ... and when Liz falls into a coma and father Joseph
is almost killed by a heart attack, he links these events to his dreams,
and eventually finds out everything has to do with his violent father,
whom he hasn't seen for ages - but when he arrives at his place, he learns
that dad has died a month ago. The next time the red door of his dreams
appears to Caleb, he walks through it, and on the other side he finds Liz
and father Joseph in trance, held by the cloaked man, who reveals himself
to be Caleb's own father, who did all of this only to lure his son here.
Dad promises to let the priest and the woman go if Caleb follows him to
the land of the dead - to which Caleb agrees, but then he tricks his
father and throws him into the land of the dead on his own. In the end,
both Liz and father Joseph are saved, and Caleb has finished the book he
was writing on. To sum this film up in a word: What? Ok, the
whole thing doesn't start out too badly and promises some David Lynch-style
mystery with a few slasher elements thrown in just for good measure. But
after a while, the film veers off into psychoanalysis and religious
symbolism, and gets both so horribly wrong that it tries to save itself
into the most stupid of endings. That all said, you might like the first
half of the movie for its buildup of weirdness, but do yourself a favour
and turn off after this to not be utterly disappointed.
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